


May You Learn

by Psuedo_sweetheart



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Grief/Mourning, M/M, aftermath of suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-04
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:54:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27881085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Psuedo_sweetheart/pseuds/Psuedo_sweetheart
Summary: Mahanon Lavellan could not withstand his grief after the events surrounding the Exalted Council, and Dorian is left to learn exactly how he failed his amatus.
Relationships: Male Inquisitor/Dorian Pavus, Male Lavellan/Dorian Pavus
Kudos: 22





	May You Learn

‘This is it. This is where I lose him.’

Dorian remembers that thought, that feeling, as he’d waited for Mahanon to come through the rift, fear so heavy and vast that it felt like it was crushing the air right out of his lungs. He’d prayed again for the first time since he’d woken strapped to a table with his father looming over him, an unfamiliar coldness in his eyes. 

He prayed and prayed, and for once the Maker’s name didn’t taste like ash on his tongue, it rang with hope. It felt like a miracle when Mahanon burst through the rift, nearly bowling Dorian over.

His expression had been stricken for a brief moment, and then softened into relief. He’d pressed a quick, gentle kiss on Dorian’s cheek, not letting him go as he used the mark to close the hole behind him. 

Dorian had been wrong, it hadn’t been the time where he lost his amatus. That time was now.

Dorian doesn’t know how he got to the funeral, he doesn’t remember walking to the place he now stood, beside the polished wood of the casket. He’s holding a drooping sprig of Arbor’s Grace in his fist, Mahanon’s favorite flower, but he doesn’t remember how they came into his possession. He’s desperately grateful for them, staring at delicate, white petals instead of the empty, lifeless face of his amatus, that had once pierced the darkness of his life like a lodestar. 

He’d envied that at times, in the beginning. How easily Mahanon could convince people that what they were doing, was important, and that who they were, was enough to do it. But there was a flip-side to that intensity, as there always is. All of Mahanon’s emotions were intense, his joy, his anger, his determination. His grief. His vast, ever-growing grief, that Dorian had looked away from, time and time again, a sickly guilt opening in his chest like a seeping, infected, wound. 

Clan Lavellan died because of hatred, yes, but also because of a terrible pride and thoughtlessness, such as Dorian had been born and bred to carry. When he looked in Mahanon’s eyes afterward and saw despair, all he could think of was, ‘because of people like me,’ and it felt too much like, ‘because of me.’ So he looked away. He grinned and made a joke, complained, told Mahanon about some fun fact he’d come across while reading, all the while telling himself he was being helpful, that distraction was what his amatus needed. 

But it was what _he_ had needed, he reminds himself, as his gaze continues to trace of the white petals of Arbor Grace, retracing the memory of Mahanon’s pink fingertips gently marking the same path, an ageless, bright wonder in his eyes as though he’d never seen a flower before, all because that particular one had been growing between flagstones in a dead elven fort. He’d asked Solas what the elven name for the flower was, but Dorian couldn’t remember what the elf had told him. He’d been distracted by the aching beauty of the first smile he’d seen on his amatus’ face in months. 

Someone is speaking over Mahanon’s body. Dorian doesn’t recognize them, and he knows Mahanon wouldn’t either. He vaguely remembers Divine Victoria sadly stating that she’d been unable to find any Dalish elf willing to come to Val Royeaux preside over his funeral. This person is an elf, but they have no beautiful tattooed lines on their face as Mahanon does- did, and they’re wearing the red and white robes of the Chantry. 

Abruptly, Dorian remembers the vile history of the vallaslin on Mahanon’s face, and his fist clenches even tighter around the flower stems. They droop even more, bowing their heads till their petals tickle against the pulled tight skin of his hands. He’d never asked how Mahanon had felt about finding out the marks on his face had not always been for the sake of honor, but rather it’s opposite. 

He glances at the face of the corpse, unable to bear not knowing if he still wore them, or if he’d decided it was a shackle he would not allow. Veridian green lines in the silhouette of looping vines and leaves, catch his eye immediately, and he breathes out a sigh of relief he knows he has no right too. He doesn’t even know why he’s relieved, if it’s only because he’s pitifully grateful that Mahanon hadn’t _not_ asked him for help if he’d wanted them removed.

Not that that absolves Dorian of his guilt. Just because Mahanon’s grief and despair hadn’t been evidenced in such an obvious way as scrubbing his face clean of his heritage that he’d always been so proud of, doesn’t mean anything, not with his body laid out in a mockery of sleep right in front of him. 

The Andrastian elf, who had been chosen in an attempt to respect the dead and yet seemed nothing short of a backhand across the face, finally stops speaking and steps down from the dais, and Dorian hates them more than he hates anyone on the planet besides himself. This person who’d never known Mahanon, had never known his culture, who’d only been chosen for their ears. 

Mahanon would hate them, he seethes to himself, even as he knows it isn’t true. He would hate this ceremony, absolutely everything about it. The Grand Cathedral, cold and vast, the decadent coffin that was going to be put in the ground to rot, the artfully bedecked strangers surrounding him, but he wouldn’t hate the elf caught up in it all. That was all Dorian focusing on the easiest target, because he has no idea how Mahanon would feel about that unmarked elf after all the secrets of his past had been revealed in one tsunami of devastating truth. 

He doesn’t know, and he never will.

That night he yells into the Fade for Fen’Harel, running through settings he doesn’t recognize, the world blurring into formless shape and color as his feet take him faster than he could ever go in waking. He knows it’s the stupidest thing he’s ever done besides leaving Mahanon Lavellan alone in Val Royeaux with his grief and loss, capped with lyrium addiction. 

It feels like his heart nearly launches itself straight up from his chest to lodge into his throat when a gigantic wolf steps out of a dark corner of the Fade and into his path. Dorian halts immediately, the lack of momentum to fight against making his brain itch with wrongness. 

“Did you know?” 

In his head, the words were a demand, but out of his mouth, they’re weak and warped by grief. A sliver of fear seems to press against heart, like a piece of ice, a prickling coldness sweeping up from his toes, setting every hair on end till it escapes out the top of his head. 

‘I did not.’

The wolf’s jaw doesn’t move, neither does it blink. Dorian’s ears are straining, as if his body knows it should be picking up vibrations on the air, but it isn’t, no matter how desperately it tries. The words aren’t heard, they just exist where they had not moments before, the Fade shimmering with the incomprehensible power behind them.

“Did you- did you speak to him?”

A pause. The words are strained this time, as if perhaps it was Solas behind the words, Solas who had known and loved Mahanon, as much as a tired, old, god could. 

‘I did not.’

A wet, choking, noise, Dorian knows is coming from him, even though he can’t feel his body reacting.

“Why?” he whispers, “Why did we leave him alone? Why didn’t we realize…”

It’s quiet so long, Dorian thinks Solas, or Fen’Harel, or whomever he is, that had once been Mahanon’s friend, and perhaps his, has gone. But then the Fade seems to shift slightly, rather like someone stiffly adjusting their stance in discomfort.

‘Because we were- _are_ , afraid of more pain. Because we have failed to learn that running from one pain always leads us to another, greater one, that cannot be run from.” 

A tear drips from Dorian’s cheek to the skin at the base of his neck and he starts in surprise at the cool, wetness intruding into his grief, his body heat dissipating between the short and vast space in-between skin and skin. He’s too tired and heart sore to bother wiping his face and just bows his head. 

“Are you tired of losing yet, Dread Wolf?” he says, in a flat tone, not caring if he offends, not caring what it costs him. “I am.”

‘You do not yet know the meaning of loss, Dorian,’ the words are sharp, but not blade sharp, not magic honed icicle sharp as they could be if the last Evanuris had willed it. The wolf turns away from him, facing back toward the darkness from which it came, ‘This is a world where gaining nothing but grief is so easy it seems almost inevitable, tragedy breeding tragedy. He showed me I was wrong.’

That pulled tight feeling returns to the very aether around him, along with a humid heaviness, like a storm about to break despite the fact there is no sky, much less clouds.

‘And he showed me I was right.’ 

The wolf vanished into the shadows, and Dorian fell to his knees like a marionette with it’s strings cut, wrenching sobs in violent hiccups of grief, not reacting when his body sank into mud, and a crack of thunder pealed overhead just before a downpour started pounding down on his prone body. 

When he next opens his eyes, it’s to revoltingly bright sunlight, and he squints, feeling the stiffness of dried tears on his face. Dorian knows how to handle this, he knows how to make his body function even after his heart has gone numb. He doesn’t let himself think, immediately sliding out of bed and going to the pitcher of water on his nightstand. He pours the water into the bowl it was sitting in and scrubs his face clean of grief as much as he can. There’s a mirror above the nightstand, but he doesn’t look into it, not until he sees a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye.

He jolts, knocking into the nightstand as he wrenches around to look, sending the precariously balanced pitcher to the floor where it explodes into a pile of ceramic shards, water filling the spaces in-between. 

There’s nothing there.

“Cole?” 

Dorian’s voice is more haggard and strained than he expects it to be, like the voice of an old man, with rickety bones, and flat eyes. The cold water on the floor seeps under his toes, but he doesn’t flinch or jerk away, he doesn’t move. It hadn’t looked like Cole. He’d seen green. Bright, veridian green. 

He clenches his hands into fists and then releases the tension in them along with a sigh. Already he was going grief mad. But then again, he’d always felt that Mahanon inspired a sort of madness in those around him. A benign, or even good madness, where they suddenly believed themselves capable of things like fighting and dying for another, even if that other had pointy ears, or perhaps horns.

There’s a knock on his door, but he doesn’t move a muscle. When it sounds again, he has to mindfully force his body to take a step toward it and then another, and then to lift his hand, grip the handle, twist his wrist, and pull. He feels exhausted even before he sees his visitor.

It’s Divine Victoria. Except it isn’t. It’s Leliana, dressed in purple, although not the same outfit he would recognize anywhere. 

“Dorian,” she greets him. 

When he doesn’t respond she goes on, “You didn’t come to speak with me.”

He still doesn’t speak, he doesn’t feel as though he remembers how.

Leliana sighs, “I’m sorry to surprise you like this, but I wanted to be sure we at least had the chance to talk before you left.”

“I already wasted my chance for a helpful chat before heading on my own way, or did you miss my lovers body splayed out like an offering yesterday afternoon?”

True to her nature, Leliana doesn’t flinch, nor does any other emotion show on her face. He hates her. He fucking hates her so much he feels like he’s choking to death on it. 

“Grief isn’t comparable,” she finally says, “I’m not here to tell that I have felt the way you do now, but I have faced this loss. I won’t tell you it gets better, or that-” 

She cuts herself off, swallows harshly, and Dorian’s furious hatred eases enough that his white knuckle grip on the doorknob, and the urge to slam the door in her face dissipates. 

“That you’ll be able to move on. But if you want to talk about it, I will listen, and if you want me to talk about it, I will. I will tell you about the War-” her eyes close in a slow blink, “Faren. His name was Faren Brosca. Isn’t it a nice name? I always thought so.” 

Her voice has changed. It’s suddenly softer, lighter, and Dorian just stares a moment, at a loss as how to respond. Then he steps aside and lets her enter his room. He realizes after he shuts the door that this is likely the height of impropriety, but decides if she doesn’t care, he doesn’t. 

Dorian sits on the bed, and realizes after Leliana pulls out the desk chair and sits that he probably should have done that for her. Leliana doesn’t look around the room, or at his face, focusing instead on his knees. 

“Every year on Faren’s birthday, his sister Rica sends me a letter. She thanks me for watching out for her brother, for being at his side through the Blight, and tells me how she’d never seen him so happy, as when he was when he was looking at me,” she grips the arms of the chair as though it’s a lifeline, her eyes no longer focused on his knees or anything else in the room.

“Those thoughts and words are usually very similar year to year, but she also writes out a memory. Something from before I knew him. Most of them are desperately sad; children growing up with no one who cared about them, having to fend for themselves. But she writes from the perspective of someone truly grateful for every good thing in her life, able to recognize and appreciate them not just after, when she’s desperately in need of comfort, but as they happen. Faren once said his sister’s optimism is what kept them alive, not him learning to threaten and kill people for coin.”

Finally, she tears her gaze from whatever memory she was caught in, or perhaps it wasn’t a memory, just a featureless wave of old and weary grief. 

“I’d forgotten,” she says the words slowly like she’s having to force them out from behind her teeth. “I’d forgotten he said that, until I received Rica’s letter yesterday just before I retired for the night, as I was wondering what I would say to you if you asked me how to keep going.”

Dorian was trembling, but he had to ask.

“Did she know? Did she speak of- of…” 

He can’t. He can’t speak Mahanon’s name out loud, can’t say what they both know is true. That he’s dead. That he killed himself. That they left him alone, and then he left them behind. 

Leliana nods.

“Yes. She wrote six pages, grieving for her brother all over again, as well as grieving for the loss of the-” she shakes her head, “No- _Mahanon_ , not the Inquisitor.”

Dorian flinches on hearing his name, but doesn’t interrupt.

“She did not know him or even meet him, but she asked for stories from the dwarves that did, and that is the person she grieves. The one who told of slaying dragons, not leaving out the part where he dove into a pile of dragon droppings to escape its flames after his shield was shattered. The one who had tears for strangers a thousand years gone. The one who worried for a lone dwarf, trapped with an ancient, inexplicable, power.”

She stood to her feet, taking Dorian’s hand into both of hers.

“If I leave you with any advice, it is this. Every day, find at least one thing to be grateful for, whether it is the roof over your head, or a terrible ale that reminds you of a terrible joke from happier times.”

It suddenly seems unfair that Leliana knows so much about Mahanon, while he knows so little of her Faren, and Dorian finds himself speaking before he thinks.

“What was his favorite flower? Faren. He’d likely never seen them before, did he like them?”

Leliana smiles, as she shakes her head, her hand on the doorknob, “I’m not sure if he liked flowers, or if he liked them because I liked them.” Her smile goes bitter, “I was so young, so excited to be in love, and our time together so short. Even with Rica, there will be more I don’t know about Faren, than what I do.”

Dorian would never tell her, but it’s her bitterness that comforts him right then, more than her sympathy or advice. 

“What flowers did he pick for you?”

“Andraste’s Grace,” she replies, her voice carefully modulated as she opens the door. She steps over the threshold, and turns around. 

“Thank you for letting me speak about my love. And for asking about him. If you ever wish to speak of your loss, know that I will listen.”

With that she leaves and Dorian sags to the bed. He can’t sleep. His ship will be leaving soon, he’d scheduled his return as soon possible, using a considerable amount of coin to persuade a captain to refrain from the week of mourning being observed by the rest of the city after the funeral. Many cities are doing the same, perhaps even most of the continent is. Dorian remembers how Mahanon had expected to be tossed aside the second Corypheus was dead, and wonders what he would think of how the world had stopped to mourn him. 

Those thoughts are a bit too close to the heart of his pain for him to consider long, although the sharpness of them inspires him to rise and shove the few things he’d brought into his bag. He should say goodbye to the very few others left who knew Mahanon before he leaves, but he doesn’t know if he can face them. It feels like choosing to walk towards the hangman’s noose, and no matter how much Dorian knows he deserves it, he just doesn’t have the strength. 

So he waits in his room with three bottles of wine, only one of them still with wine in it as he lurches to his feet once the sun is where it needs to be in the sky for him to leave. 


End file.
